How to create simple shapes in Affinity Designer

In this tutorial I’ll continue to show you how to work in Affinity Designer.

In this tutorials, you’ll learn how to create simple geometric figure Rectangle and similar tool Rounded Rectangle. As in all vector design software, it is pretty easy to draw but as in every software has different features of objects.

So let’s begin.

To draw Rectangle click on the icon and after clicking mouse cursor and top panel will change. Now you can just click and drag to draw a rectangle.

One thing that I don’t like in Affinity Designer is here, all your objects must be on the sheet. Object that outside of page will not visible. When workspace visible that’s very useful. Because when you are working with complex design and don’t want to every time turn off and on layers, you can simply put them to the side and continue work like in Coreldraw, Inkscape or in Illustrator.

After creating, switch to select tool and then select object. You’ll see that when you are selecting top toolbar gets active and here you can see all features of selected object.

If you’ll like to change position, dimension or rotation angle then you can do it in Transform panel that you can find on the right bottom of software.

That’s little bit uncomfortable especially if you are ex-user of other vector design software. But you can easily drag and attach transform dialog box to any place or even make it flow.

Now let’s take look at top toolbar and see what kind of features we can find there

The first options on the top toolbar from the left side are the color of fill and stroke of selected shape. Here also you can control all stroke parameters.

With Single Radius, you can control how the radius of corners will work. Right now all corners radius will be equal. But if you’ll uncheck it then you’ll able to set a different radius for each corner.

With absolute size, you can switch between pixels and percent in corner radius.

You can also control style of corner smoothness.

This option makes you available to see rotation center of the object. By default, it's in the center of the object and will rotate around this point. You can change the position of this point to make object rotate differently.

Hide selection with this icon. You can see it when drawing.

By this button, you can reset selection box. This option useful if you are rotating the object.

By this option, you can convert an object into curves that give you the ability to modify an object in many ways.

Every illustration of hard looking design is combined and modified simple shapes. So that’s why first you need to know how to work with simple standard tools.

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